Chapter 25
TWENTY-FIVE
They forget they hate each other, that they want to rip out the other’s heart and bite off tendons with their teeth. All that matters now is getting Jude out of the walls.
“Get him out.” She is incoherent with her despair. “brEN, GET HIM OUT. GET HIM OUT.”
Bren snatches the hammer from her and shoves her aside as he feels along the walls, pressing his ear to one, then another. Too slow. They need to move faster.
She is choked by helplessness, she is ravaged by it. Something inside her snaps with violent, bloody terror as she listens to her son’s screams; the vulnerable, childish terror of them, the shrill cadence of undiluted pain.
“Jude, Jude, listen to me.” Bren pounds his fist against a wall in the dining room, far from where Jude vanished. “You need to stay still, buddy, do you understand? Don’t move.”
Then he begins smashing open the wall.
The speed and velocity with which he moves feel surreal, as if he is a god of this place, his body saturated in offering blood. All she can think of is him wrenching the hammer out of the boards and it coming away splattered red, shattered flecks of skull on the end.
But he keeps beating the wall and she watches, a stillness falling over her like a hand over her mouth. He’s in the wrong place. The screams aren’t coming from there.
Elodie runs back to the living room where Jude disappeared and rests both her bloody hands to the wallpaper.
“Jude?” Her voice is gentle, coercing, a promise of comfort and cuddles, of shielding him until everything is all right. “I’m here. I can hear you. I can hear your heart beating.”
And then he’s there, his face pushing out against the wallpaper so she can trace the outline of his skull with her thumbs. He is alive in there, he is not devoured. The house will give him back.
But as she sobs with relief, scratching feebly at the paper to break open this membrane covering his face, she realizes he is too small to be her son.
The wallpaper twists over his covered face and she can see his mouth shape the word.
Ewo-dee.
She screams.
She slams both hands against the wallpaper to shove him back in and water saturates her palms as if the plaster has been soaked; as if it is drowning.
this isn’t real I’ve been poisoned I’m crazy I’m hallucinating this isn’t—
You called for him. You called for Jude.
The wail in her throat feels deadened, drowned, as she stumbles backward, watching the face sink back into the wall. Then there is nothing.
She only realizes then that the screaming has stopped.
She hurls herself back to the dining room, tripping in her desperate haste, dry-heaving sobs crawling up her throat, not wanting to see.
Needing to see.
The bloodied hammer, the skull shattered like a sugar egg—
please don’t be, please don’t—
Around her, the house pulses, lurid and quick, a clock counting down, a heartbeat on the cusp of flatlining.
As she skids to a stop, she sees the hole Bren has torn open, wide enough for him to fit his head and shoulders inside the house’s skeleton and wrench something out of the dark. Black water throbs sluggishly from the hole, the smell of it like death and corruption.
From the house’s festered cavity of a mouth, Bren drags out a child.
He collapses instantly, Jude clutched to his blood-soaked chest, his despair a living thing engulfing them both. He rocks Jude carefully, cradling him with such tender reverence.
Tears run down her cheeks, soft and hot, and her mouth is filled with salt.
She takes a stumbling step forward.
They are a painting done only in charcoals, the little boy and the monster who helped make him, the way they curve into each other, their spines turned to green wood and flowers growing out of their split wrists.
Bren palms Jude’s filthy cheeks, presses his mouth to Jude’s temple as his eyes squeeze shut and he cries. Silently, gratefully.
“Jude.” Her voice cracks.
They look up.
Bren tightens his arms about Jude, protective and fierce, and tilts their bodies away from her. All she can do is stand there, forlorn and unwanted. At least it is a familiar feeling.
Then Jude peeks around Bren’s arm, those dark, winsome eyes looking for her in the dark. He still holds his mangled toy rabbit.
Elodie sinks carefully to her knees and stretches out her arms. “Baby, come to Mama.”
Something flickers on his face, uncertainty, worry, his chin dimpling as his bottom lip quivers. Only moonlight streaks across the floor, enough to bathe the angles of their faces silver.
Bren’s breathing hard, his hand going to his chest as his face contorts. “I won.”
“Please … Please let us go. I’ll say nothing. I’ll never tell.”
Bren closes his eyes and then bends close to Jude’s ear. “Everything’s going to be okay. I know you’re scared … It’s okay to be scared. But I’m going to fix everything, and you’ll be safe with me, all right?”
“Jude, come to Mama.” Her arms are still outstretched. “We’ll go far, far away from this scary house and nothing will ever hurt you again. I—I promise.”
It’s the tremble, the stammer, the lie in it that makes Bren look at her with such devastated anguish that she hates him for the way he makes her feel.
“You need,” he says, slow and ragged, “to let him go. You are the worst thing for him.”
“No—”
“Elodie.” His voice is steady now, a calm settling over him. “You can’t have him.”
Jude’s hand is tight in Bren’s shirt, and he seems smaller than ever, his pajamas damp and filthy with grot from inside the walls. Bren’s blood is imprinted across his front like a claim, like a baptism. She needs to separate them.
“Come here.” She is needling, begging, nearly crying. “Come on, baby. Please.”
Bren cups Jude’s face, smoothing the damp curls from his eyes, but when he sucks in a ragged breath, blood sluices down his chin.
She just has to outlast him.
Jude flicks his gaze between them, fear melting down his face as he clutches the rabbit to his chest.
“Jude.” She forces herself to sound stern, but her voice shakes on each word with a wretched kind of fury. “I am your mother. I am your fucking mother, and that—that man is dangerous. Come here. We’ll get away. I—I love you.”
He wriggles out of Bren’s arms, and her heart explodes in her chest. She is elation and she is glory. She is Mother and he is Son and this is how it should be.
She’s holding back tears as Jude tentatively crosses the room, his toes curled up against the cold floorboards. He puts his thumb in his mouth, the stuffed rabbit dangling from the crook of his elbow.
Then he hesitates and glances back at Bren.
She thinks Bren will lunge forward and snatch Jude, but he does nothing.
He slumps against the wall, his breathing gone shallow, the ruined half of his face petrifying as blood crusts in the saw’s grooves.
He has to understand her son was always going to choose her, the invisible umbilical cord still tying them together, the bloodied purple weight of it wrapped about their throats.
She holds out her arms.
He tiptoes toward her.
Then he pauses, just out of reach and holds out his rabbit. She takes it obediently and stares down at the filthy thing: the matted fur and the torn-out button eye and the rips where the stuffing pokes out. When she looks up, there is only this anxious sort of hope in his face.
“Rabbit loves you,” he says.
She thinks this is the first time he’s ever said that to her. Tears burn her eyes.
Then he runs back across the room and flings himself into Bren’s waiting arms.
She is still kneeling on the floor, staring at the rabbit in her hands, surrounded by sawdust and splintered wood and the scattered tools of a doomed renovation.
The hammer lies on the floor before her, discarded.
Bren clambers slowly to his feet, still holding Jude.
He limps toward the doorway, each step labored, his breathing erratic, but something calm in his eyes.
As he passes her, he pauses long enough to cup a hand on her head in a gesture so tender she has to close her eyes.
Those are the hands she loves, cherishes, the strong and capable hands that pulled her from the wreckage of her life.
Those are the chapped, calloused hands she’s kissed a thousand times, the hands that have held her and worshipped her and loved her.
Those are the hands that tried to fix this house, tried to fix her.
They were always the same, she and the house.
“Do whatever you want.” He sounds so tired. “Take anything. Just don’t come back.”
His hand slips from her hair and he keeps walking, his footsteps echoing toward the front door. He’s murmuring something comforting to Jude. Metal clinks; he’s pocketing his keys, readying himself to leave.
She doesn’t remember deciding to stand, to follow them out to the entryway where he’s trying to unlock the front door with one hand, holding Jude with the other. His depth perception will be skewed with just one eye—or perhaps it is the house, not letting them out.
A fathomless hunger echoes in her chest, and she wonders if it was ever the house that needed to be fed, or if it was only ever her.
She is a black star, exploded, starving, cavernous as she walks toward them.
She still loves him, she knows this, just as she knows he will do everything to take her children from her, both Jude and the unborn baby. They have always been his. The truth of it gnaws down to the marrow of her bones with unstoppable, frantic terror.
Just don’t come back. He’s lying. It will never end here.
“You’re right, you know,” she says quietly, and he turns back to her, keys still in his hands. “I don’t deserve him. Or you. I’m going to do what’s right, I promise.”
The hammer comes up in a swinging arc and smashes into the side of his head.